The Fingerprints of Musical Greatness – Handwritten Scores and Letters by Mozart and Beethoven

One of the things I love about looking at the old manuscripts, you don't have the luxury of reformatting the way we're used to in the computer age. You're pretty much committed. And what amazes me is how sure all of these are, how little they have felt the need to change. They obviously knew what they wanted to write before they wrote. For me, the significance and actually honor to be able to hold this is there was a time in history when Giuseppe Verdi wrote down, and this was in front of him, and his hands touched the paper, and he created this. And it's really, I think, very, very special. This is an original manuscript in Wagner's hand. It's a concert ending to a part in Act I of his opera Das Rheingold. Wagner was a great composer, and in a way one feels a little bit closer to the composer to see the actual handwriting. He was very keen on metal nibs. I have one dating back to around the time he would have been writing, and one can almost see how his hand was moving in the order in which he would write the notes. I wish I had known about this years ago. This particular piece is a fragment of the opera Il Lombardi by Giuseppe Verdi. It consists of 9 bars with the signature G Verdi in the bottom. This is a fragment with a vocal line and then a basic bass line giving the harmonic accompaniment. He was approximately 30 years old when he composed the opera, and it certainly had great success. I believe this would have been written as something to be given to a friend or a patron as a gift. These are sketches from Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor. Looks to have been done in pencil, on paper. This string quartet was among the later of the quartets he wrote. I believe this was written within the last 5 or 7 years of his life. Actually, his later string quartets are really interesting because they're based on what he imagined, because at that point he physically couldn't hear anything. Consequently, there's some remarkable writing in them, much ahead of their time. This is a title page of a cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. It was written for 2 oboes, 2 violins, viola, and continuo, continuo in that case would mean celli, maybe a bass and harpsichord, and it has the signature Johann Sebastian Bach. Actually, it's very beautiful handwriting, I have to say, and a beautiful signature. One of the things I love about music is it is able to speak to a variety of emotions and result in many reactions without the use of words, and this is what we use to represent that. As such, it's part of that process to bring something to life, and for me it's very exciting indeed.